No Shelf Required has been busy this past year exploring the many topics of eBooks and libraries. Very soon, two new publications will be available from ALA Publishing which share the No Shelf Required name. These new publications contain completely new content, expanding upon No Shelf Required: E-books in Libraries, ALA Editions, 2011. Details are below. For a complete list of NSR publications, please visit our publications page.

With the advent of the internet and growing popularity of Wikipedia, traditional library reference tools have experienced a decline in use. As a result, many reference publishers began producing electronic books or converting traditional print multi-volume titles to online databases. While this has been a valiant effort, much of the content still goes undiscovered due to limited access from subscription costs, firewalls, passwords, and lack of indexing in search engines.

A new book from IGI Publishing, the first in the Advances in Library and Information Science (ALIS) series, discusses the myriad issues with e-reference discovery in libraries. The 23 chapters explore the topic in academic, public, and school libraries as well as from the publishers perspective. The book is available in print or e formats. E formats offer the ability to purchase individual chapters. The first ALIS newsletter featured the preface and 8 selected chapters from the book. Continue reading E-Discovering Reference→

Great post in the Idea Logical Blog about 3 new eBook platforms – Google Editions, blio, and Copia. The author, Mike Shatzkin, discusses each of the readers angles, pricing, content, and challenges. Shatzkin’s final take, “So I think we can expect a multi-player ebook market, with some incompatible formats and a lot of incompatible DRM for some years to come. And the players currently in the game can expect their sales to go up but their market share to go down when the three new entrants join the fray this fall. That much seems certain, but very little else does.”

Each Friday before the ALA Conference, the Independent Reference Publishers Group (IRPG) gets together to have a program and discussion of issues surrounding reference publishing. The ALA Annual meeting was no exception. A large group of publishers and librarians gathered to figure out, “how did we get here?” A panel of librarians, LIS instructors, reference contributors, and wholesalers, organized by Peter Tobey at Salem Press, presented some thoughts and challenges for reference content and reference publishing. A summary of these comments is below. The panelists included: Buffy Hamilton, a teacher/librarian from Creekview H.S. in Canton, GA and blogger at The Unquiet Librarian and 1/4 blogger for Libraries and Transliteracy; Sue Polanka (me); Dave Tyckoson, Associate Dean of the Madden Library, CSU – Fresno; Bernadette Low, a frequent contributor to reference content from the Community College of Baltimore City; William Taylor, Manager, Continuations iSelect (R) and Standing Orders at Ingram Content Group; and Jessica Moyer, a doctoral candidate in literacy education at the U of Minnesota and instructor of a MLIS reference course. Continue reading Independent Reference Publishers Group (IRPG) Meeting Summary – ALA Conference→